Miss Me When I'm Gone (22 page)

Chapter 44

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sam demanded. “We could’ve gone together. We could’ve shared the driving.”

I slipped my shampoo into my canvas bag. “Because I knew you had that thing with your boss this weekend. You’ve been talking about it for weeks.”

“I can’t get out of it,” he said, pulling himself up on the bed next to my bag.

“I know. That’s what I’m trying to explain. That’s why I didn’t ask. But I really need to go this weekend.”

Sam watched me as I waddled around the room, looking for my one pair of maternity tights.

“I’ve made several appointments to talk to various people. And my time when I can travel is
really
running out.”

“How about you postpone it just till next weekend? We could make it into, like, a babymoon.”

I straightened and looked up from my packing.

“A
babymoon,
Sam?”

“Yeah, it’s when the new parents go away for a romantic trip before—”

“I know what it is. I’m just surprised to hear you say it. Trust me. Emerson, New Hampshire, is not a very romantic place.”

Sam was silent.

“Besides, I think that babymoon thing is for yuppie parents, you know?” I reassured him.

“That’s not what we are?”

I slapped one more shirt into my bag and zipped it up. “God, I hope not. Don’t even joke about that.”

“Wow, Jamie. What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me?” I repeated.
“What’s wrong with me?”

I was, on some level, only pretending to be offended by the question. Because it was actually a reasonable one. I just didn’t know how to answer it.

“Nothing is wrong with me. One of my best friends died six weeks ago and I need to do this for her. How’s that?”

“Do you need to do it right now? Do you need to do it
this weekend
? Is that really what Gretchen would have wanted?”

I rolled my eyes at the second question. I never liked this assumption—that once someone died, “what they would’ve wanted” suddenly becomes sensible, altruistic, knowable. I wasn’t sure Gretchen’s desires had ever been any of those things.

“How about this,” I said, taking Sam’s hand. “I’ll do this trip this weekend. Then next weekend, not a word about Gretchen’s book. We’ll go away together for a night, maybe to that bed-and-breakfast we liked in the Berkshires? Something like that. Make it a
real
break for both of us.”

Sam shook his head. “That’s not necessary. It’s not about me needing a vacation. And I would never ask you to stop talking about Gretchen.”

Sam stood up and picked up my bag for me. “If you need to do this, I can’t ask you to stay. I guess I should let you go now if you don’t want to be driving in the dark.”

We walked down to the front door together. I said nothing, as Sam’s resignation was making me feel terrible—no less resolved, but terrible nonetheless.

“Promise me you’ll call as soon as you get there?” he said after he’d tossed my bag into my backseat.

“Promise,” I said, kissing him.

Chapter 45

“It’s All Wrong, but It’s All Right”

Howard Johnson

Gatlinburg, Tennessee

I love country music autobiographies. Maybe this is obvious by now.

Loretta’s famous
Coal Miner’s Daughter,
and her awesomely titled follow-up,
Still Woman Enough.
Dolly’s
My Life and Other Unfinished Business.
Tammy’s
Stand by Your Man.

They all sit next to my bed at home, and I’ve read them in repeated rotation.

They help put me to sleep. Not because they’re boring—they’re not. But because I find them oddly comforting—with the possible exception of Tammy’s, which has fallen out of the rotation and stays on the bottom of the pile. That one makes me sad—but that’s a different essay.

I’ve just finished with Dollywood today in Pigeon Forge, but decided to stay in this area for a night longer. Tomorrow I’m taking a break from the country ladies to stop by Ripley’s Believe It or Not, one of Gatlinburg’s many tourist traps. Supposedly they’ve got Old Sparky there, and that’s a can’t-miss for me. But for tonight, I’m exhausted from the hot sun and manufactured fun of Dollywood. Instead of walking up and down the streets of Gatlinburg with all of the other tourists, I’m holed up in my motel. Huddled in a blanket and eating a couple of éclairs from a brilliant place in town called the Donut Friar, I’m rereading my favorite parts of
Still Woman Enough.

Loretta’s books tell some pretty hard stories. The first,
Coal Miner’s Daughter,
is a rags-to-riches story about her hardscrabble life growing up in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, her marriage at fourteen, her life as a young mother, and her road to stardom. As tough as some of those stories are, her second book tells all of the harsher stories that she kept out of the first—stories that detail the extent of her husband’s alcoholism and violence early in their marriage. And further, this book has much more in it about loss—loss of her son by drowning, loss of her husband, loss of music friends like Conway Twitty and Tammy Wynette.

Maybe
comforting
will seem an odd word for this material. There is something reassuring, however, about knowing someone is being completely honest with you about her life. There’s no attempt to sound clever or PC, or to play it one way or another, or even a suggestion that the reader should learn something from Loretta’s stories. And it goes without saying that marriages like hers were not unusual in the time and place in which she grew up. But that’s really not the point, from Loretta’s perspective. For Loretta, it’s not history or sociology or sexual politics.

This is what my husband was like. He drank a lot. He cheated on me. He hit me and I hit him back. And I loved him.

It’s disconcerting. But it’s her life. Is she supposed to put it in more palatable terms for the comfort of her readers?

Loretta doesn’t advocate that women enter or endure marriages as she did. She simply explains how it was for her, and doesn’t try to frame it with a lesson or a message. And somewhat disarmingly (to this reader, at least), she never says she wishes it had gone any other way. I don’t fully understand why I find this comforting. Maybe it’s because her autobiographies read like an admission that life is painful and complicated, and that relationships require complex thought and, usually, a fair amount of suffering. Of course I was aware of this before I cracked Loretta’s books. Perhaps this message still feels novel to me, as a child of the eighties. I grew up on health-class role plays and sanitized sitcoms, everything After-School-Specialized, categorized as healthy or unhealthy, easily identifiable as one or the other. The generation that came before us learned all of that for us, so we didn’t need to figure it out for ourselves.

Which is, of course, ridiculous. Some of us will have desires or relationships that fall slightly out of others’ comfort zones. You ultimately decide for yourself what is Okay and Not Okay.

Though less stark and less grim, Dolly’s bubbly memoir carries a similar message for me. Although she does not go into great detail, she implies that she and her husband might have sometimes turned to the affections of others while she was on the road—that they had an open marriage. That was fine by both of them, she explains, as long as it didn’t get in the way of their relationship when she was around, and they respected each other by keeping their dalliances private. She’s so coy about it I suspect there weren’t really any dalliances, but she’s not willing to say one way or another—or apologize one way or another, for that matter. That’s as much as she’s willing to say, and the details are nobody else’s business.

When talking about her weight issues, she says offhand that while she doesn’t advocate making yourself throw up, chewing up your food and spitting it out might not be a bad idea. In her own words:

“ ‘That’s disgusting,’ you say. That may be, but what’s more disgusting? Spitting out food or being a lardass?”

I love it. Where I come from, chewing and spitting out your food as a weight-loss technique would definitely be considered a gateway behavior to disordered eating, a sign of poor body image, and definitely Not Okay.

Dear reader, at this point, you probably think I don’t get out much—at least, much outside my sterile little liberal bubble. And this isn’t the case at all. I get out a fair amount. It’s that I admire these women for the relative purity of their voices. Perhaps they occasionally filter their experiences. But I doubt that either of them, Dolly or Loretta, ever finds herself, before fully settling into an opinion about something, pausing for an almost instinctual second to wonder,
But do we agree with this? Is this Okay?

I admire these women for deciding what their own boundaries are, and for being willing to detail them without apology. I’m not about to spit out this delicious éclair or arrange an open marriage or live with a volatile alcoholic. My boundaries will be different from theirs. Still, unless I define them myself, Okay and Not Okay is bullshit.

—Tammyland

Chapter 46

Dorothy’s house was my first stop, once I’d checked into the motel. She’d had me promise I’d come for dinner, and I had agreed, provided she let me bring the food this time: pizza and salad and root beer.

“Did Judy tell you I had something for you?” Dorothy asked, after we’d eaten.

“Yeah, she mentioned that.”

“I figured. Judy can’t keep her mouth shut. It was supposed to be a surprise,” Dorothy said, handing me a small shirt box. “Open it.”

I did. There, laid out in tissue paper, was a tiny blue-and-white sweater, with white elephant buttons.

“Oh, wow,” I said. “It’s gorgeous. I can’t believe you did this in just the last couple of weeks.”

“I like to keep my hands busy. I do it while I watch TV.”

“What about the hats for the African babies?” I asked.

“I got sick of doing the same boring hat over and over. I finally boxed them up and had Diane send them off.”

“Well, thank you so much.”

“I love knitting baby things. It was my pleasure.”

As she said this, there was a knock on the door, and then a singsong “Hel-looo?” echoing into the kitchen.

I expected the stout, chipper Judy to appear, but to my surprise, Diane stepped into the room, a tin canister in hand.

“Hello, dear,” Dorothy said. “Jamie’s here.”

“I can see that,” Diane replied, giving me a little wave. “Good to see you again, Jamie.”

“You, too.”

“I heard you were going to be here this evening.” She took a seat and folded her thin hands on the tin. “And I heard you had a couple of questions for me.”

“Oh,” I said, remembering my questions to Judy about the pediatricians. “Yeah, that’s right.”

Diane opened her tin, showing the contents to Dorothy.

“Hermits,” she said proudly. “Your favorite, right?”

“One of them,” Dorothy said, taking the tin from her. She took one and then offered the tin to me. I took one reluctantly. I’d been eating too much sugar since Gretchen died. True to his nickname, Charlie Bucket was probably having a Willy Wonka sort of experience in the womb lately.

“So,” Diane said, “I can’t stick around for long, but Judy told me you were asking about some notes Gretchen made, about the pediatricians in town? Particularly Dr. Platt, right?”

“Yeah. And the name seemed to come up when Gretchen was learning about Shelly’s last job. At the pharmacy. There was maybe some problem with her job, and certain prescriptions.”

Diane looked puzzled and clicked her tongue against her teeth while she considered this.

“Ohhhh,” she said softly, after a moment. “I remember now.”

She nodded as if in recognition of the memory. “You know what that probably was about? I don’t know if Shelly would have told Judy this, but she made a pretty serious mistake at that job. The switching around of young patients to different doctors—I mean, when Dr. Platt died . . . I think that confused Shelly, and it caused her to mix up a kid’s prescription with someone else’s—an adult with a similar name. I don’t remember the details, but it was something that could’ve been a real disaster. The kid had a lot of serious health problems.”

“How’d they catch the mistake?”

“Um, I think the kid’s mom caught it. The kid had taken maybe one dose, not enough to do anything serious yet, but . . . you know, it was scary.”

“Was Shelly shaken by that?”

Diane nodded gravely. “Very.”

“Do you remember the kid’s name?”

“No. I think the last name was Johnson, something like that. A common last name, so it was easy to mix up.”

“Was your dad by any chance the prescribing doctor? Dorothy and I were chatting about it earlier, and she said there was a time, after Dr. Platt died, when some of the kids went to him.”

Dorothy nodded. “That’s right, isn’t it, Diane?”

“Yeah, that’s true. But no, he wasn’t the prescribing doctor. I don’t recall who that would have been. I guess it would have had to have been Dr. Copalman or Dr. Silver. I think those were the only other two general practitioners in Emerson at the time. Maybe Schreiner was here, too. I don’t remember. Do you, Dorothy?”

“No, I really don’t,” Dorothy said. “Sorry.”

“So . . . but Shelly was a little fearful for her job after that?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. She was really scared.”

“I don’t remember this,” Dorothy admitted.

“But you remember when Dr. Platt died suddenly, right?” Diane turned to her.

“Yes. That was sad. All the kids loved him.”

“Well, all of his patients had to use other doctors in town for a bit, while the pediatric group found a replacement. Which took a while.”

“I see.” Dorothy nodded. “I got that.”

“And that was about the same time Shelly was working at the pharmacy. It was the switching of doctors, I think, that made it easy to make a mistake. Before that, you’d never mix up a kid’s prescription with an adult’s, partly because Shelly—like everyone in town—knew who the kids’ doctors were versus the adult ones. But, anyway. It worked out. It blew over. She kept her job.”

“Huh,” said Dorothy, rising from her chair. “She must’ve not told her mother about it. Because I’ve never heard that story.”

Dorothy excused herself to go to the bathroom, and I used the opportunity to ask Diane a more sensitive question.

“But do you think her relationship with her boss . . . I mean, with Phil Coleman, may have protected her a little?”

Diane studied me before answering. I studied her back, noticing that the perfect ivory quality of her skin was partly an illusion. Beneath her eyes, purple-brown pouches shone under powdery makeup.

“Maybe,” she said, biting her lip regretfully. “There may have been some truth to that. I think Melanie Rittel was a bit of a drama queen, but I don’t think she was as off base as Judy sometimes makes it sound. As I’ve said, Judy is very protective of Shelly’s reputation—I mean, where it’s possible to be. And I think sometimes she didn’t want to believe some of the things people said about Shelly. Like, I believe Shelly and Judy’s brother had a little thing going, for a time, and Judy just didn’t want to see it . . .”

Diane stopped talking for a moment, her eyes widening. “Is there any mention of
that
in your recordings?”

“What recordings?” I said, surprised.

“I mean, Gretchen’s recorded interviews. Judy mentioned them to me. I hadn’t realized till after she talked to you earlier this week—that Gretchen had recorded some of her interviews. Judy hadn’t either.”

“Oh. Um . . . no. I haven’t heard anything like that. I haven’t listened to all of them yet. They can be kind of hard to hear.”

“I see.” Diane nodded and reached into her tin for another hermit. “That makes sense. But on the question of Coleman . . . I’m not sure. Knowing Shelly, it was definitely possible. I didn’t feel it had a place in Grippo’s trial. It wasn’t fair. It was a distraction.”

“And Coleman never admitted to it.”

“No. Certainly not. It’s possible it happened and he didn’t want to own up to it, though, even under oath. He had a fiancée at the time. Now his wife.”

“And he’s still a pharmacist in town. The rumors didn’t hurt his business?”

“Not so much. People didn’t like to see Shelly maligned so badly at trial. It was really hurtful to her mother, who people really loved and supported. People sort of saw Phil Coleman as yet another person hurt by all the gossip, when it was Grippo who really should have suffered. So, no. People left Phil Coleman alone.”

Diane sighed and broke her hermit into four even pieces, then ate one reluctantly.

Dorothy returned, and Diane asked me if I had any other questions. I said no, for now. Diane left soon after that. After a cup of tea with Dorothy, and a few more cookies, I thanked Dorothy and retired to my motel.